OnePlus 8 hands-on review

Design

The OnePlus 8 feels quite familiar in the hand. It's almost identical to the OnePlus 7 Pro and 7T Pro - from the curves down to dimensions and bezels. There are a couple of subtle differences and you can notice most of them only if you put those phones side by side. This in turn means that the vanilla 8 is pretty close to the 8 Pro too.

The standard 8's screen is just as big as the previous Pro while the 8 Pro has grown in size to 6.78". You wouldn't notice any difference between the 6.65-inch panel on the OnePlus 8 and the 6.67-inch screen on the 7 Pro and 7T Pro. The only difference is that the 8 feels a bit narrower due to its slightly taller aspect ratio. And while the 7T had a flat display that appealed to many users, the new 8 goes along with current trends and offers a curved screen to the sides. But instead of a notch, we have a punch-hole design this time around with the hole being placed in the upper-left corner. We have mixed feelings about this and at first glance it seems that the hole eats away more screen real estate compared to the minimalist notch from the previous generation.

Another interesting thing to note is that the edges of the 8 are slightly more square-ish compared to the 7T Pro giving it a tad tighter feel and more "masculine" appearance if we can call it that.

Leaving the front aside, we once again see a familiar back design with curved glass for better grip and comfort when holding it. There's no denying that the phone is a big one and it's hard to handle and also since it's glass, it's slippery. At least the glossy finish feels a tad more grippy compared to the satin, frosted glass of the 7 and 7T-series. OnePlus says it's 3D Corning Gorilla Glass sheet on the back but doesn't specify which version.

Two new colors made the cut this year - Interstellar Glow and Glacial Green and in addition to the already known Onyx Black if you are looking for a more conservative design. We got the Interstellar Glow, which also has a familiar appeal. We can't put our finger on it but it reminds us of the Aura Glow gradient launched with the Galaxy Note10 lineup. However, the Interstellar Glow on the OnePlus 8 has more of that silver layer on the top and goes into the almost peachy kind of look. It's mesmerizing and looks even better in person but fingerprints do stick easily.

Gone is the circular design module from the last generation and the vertical camera stack is here once again. In fact, the camera bump itself is identical to the 7 Pro and 7T Pro's in terms of height, protrusion and width.

And as for the side frame, it blends perfectly with the back glass giving a sense of continuity. The frame itself is another design element that feels familiar and the button positioning is the same - volume rocker on the left, power button on the right flanked by the hardware notification slider.

Honestly, there's nothing much to talk about. In terms of design, it feels quite familiar if you had the chance to hold a OnePlus 7 Pro or 7T Pro. Except maybe that the 8 is considerably lighter (180g) than the 7T Pro (206g) while having a bigger battery and the same screen size. The lack of a camera pop-up mechanism must have shaved off quite a few extra grams. There are no other major design changes except the transition to a curved display and punch-hole from a flat display and a notch, or a full-screen design depending on how you look at it.

Display

Ever since the original OnePlus 7-series, the company has been really focusing on its displays making them the centerpiece features of its handsets. The 8-series make no exception. Even though the vanilla 8 doesn't go up to 120Hz refresh rate and has a lower resolution, it doesn't mean that it's something you should take lightly.

The screen stands tall at 20:9 aspect ratio, just a couple of pixel rows shy of the cinematic 21:9 aspect. Anyway, 1080 x 2400px resolution fits inside a 6.55-inch panel or if you account for the rounded corners, it would be about 6.34". Now it's slightly curved to the sides like the 7 Pro, 7T Pro and the 8 Pro. But on the 8-series, the curves are just a tad tighter distorting the picture a bit more compared to the older 7 and 7T generation. Only people sensitive to the issue will notice, though, and isn't a deal-breaker for sure.

As we pointed out, the 8's screen "settles" for 90Hz refresh rate, which is still good enough considering that there are modern gaming and mainstream flagships in 2020 and late 2019 with 90 and even 60Hz screens. Anyway, OnePlus still calls it Fluid AMOLED representing the fluidity the high-refresh-rate panel provides and the curved nature of the front design.

Color accuracy is said to be extremely high, "visually indistinguishable from perfect" with the human eye and also supports HDR10+. Unfortunately, some of the 8 Pro features aren't on the list such as Adaptive Display (adjusting the color temperature depending on the surrounding environment) and Motion Graphics Smoothing.

Now, the former is probably nice to have but we aren't exactly sure with the second one. The so-called MEMC (Motion Estimation, Motion Compensation) feature is usually found in high-end TVs and puts an extra "made-up" frame between the actual ones resulting in a smooth cinematic experience. So instead of a standard 24 fps video or a movie, you get, in this case, 120 frames per second viewing experience. But there are some caveats and the most notable one is the fuzziness caused by the interpolation of frames. That's why the MEMC tech is a controversial topic.

Our point is, that we would argue how game-changer of a feature this really is and is it really worth taking it into consideration when choosing between the standard and the Pro version. Even if OnePlus is throwing in a lot of marketing efforts. We've tried it on the 8 Pro and our experience was a mixed bag at best. It worked well with talking head footage - filmed conversations between characters but it didn't look well with pretty much anything else.

To be honest, we are more interested to see if there's any bump in the maximum brightness compared to its predecessor, not that the latter was lacking. We just find that metric particularly important as it determines how well it performs on a bright sunny day.